


Procedures for Intimacy Growth

by KayleeFrye



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: F/M, Post-The Hanging Tree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 18:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8856991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayleeFrye/pseuds/KayleeFrye
Summary: Beverley sits Peter down for an important conversation about their future."It wasn’t that I was avoiding Beverley exactly. It was just—every time I thought of her, I thought of sitting in The Chestnut Tree with Lady Ty sitting across from me saying, I’m going to outlive my babies."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [templemarker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/templemarker/gifts).



> Happy holidays, templemarker! Enjoy. <3
> 
> Thanks to minimcalibre for the wonderful beta, confidence boost, and much needed architectural info dumps! Any remaining errors are my own.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when Beverley Brook turned up at the door of the tech cave in late October with a pack of Star Beer and two containers of take-away curry from the place a couple blocks from the Folly that we both liked because, unlike a lot of the take-away available, it wasn’t mild by the West African cooking standards we were both accustomed to from our childhoods.

“Hey babes,” she said—and pointedly didn’t lean in to kiss me. That was a foreboding sign.

“Bev,” I said brightly. In spite of the alarm bells going off in my head, it was hard not to smile at the sight of her in the doorway. “I’m swamped. I don’t have time for dinner.”

Since I’d put my foot in it and announced to the Met at large my intention to write a consultation document providing other OCUs an outline of procedures for handling serious Falcon and Falcon-suspected incidents, Folsom had put his own foot down and boisterously decreed that I had a two-week deadline to get the first draft out to primary stakeholders. It was, I suspected, a combo move on his part. On the one hand, effort to re-assert his control after I’d successfully checkmated him in a game of bureaucratic chess that, had I lost, would have resulted in serious consequences for me—up to and including some time on the wrong side of a cell if I was particularly unlucky, and without Guleed to take pity on me this time. While for Folsom had entailed nothing more than a blow to his ego at being eloquently thwarted by the black PC he so fervently despised, he considered this unacceptably audacious of me. White guys of Folsom’s ilk have fragile egos like that; apparently being called out on their bullshit is about the worst thing you can do to them. I can’t say I had much sympathy for Folsom’s position.

His other intent was to punish me for the incident at One Hyde Park because he’d decided, unequivocally, that sole responsibility for that incident lay at my feet. I resigned myself to it. Somehow I was always being blamed for major property damage that involved weird bollocks in any capacity. It hardly seemed to matter that most of it wasn’t actually my fault.

The trouble with meeting Folsom’s deadline was that every time I thought I was making headway, another ‘what-if’ scenario struck me, which always subsequently led to half a dozen other situations and suggested operational procedures to outline, inevitably sticking me in a seemingly endless spiral whereby the paper grew by leaps and bounds without ever getting any closer to completion.

“Wrong,” said Bev. “You have time. I’ve already cleared it with Nightingale. I figured, since you’ve apparently been so busy lately, that I’d come to you. You are busy, aren’t you? I mean, you wouldn’t avoid me would you, Peter?”

She was calm but there was a definite chill in her voice. The sort of quiet chill that could only spell trouble for me. She slid past me into the tech cave and I closed the door gingerly behind her. That gave me a much needed moment to consider my options.

It wasn’t that I was avoiding Beverley exactly. Folsom’s deadline was creeping up on me and it had been short to begin with (or, in Folsom’s words, “more than generous and ample time for you to fulfill your obligations, Constable. Or are you incapable of following through on your promises?” and I’d been smart enough to keep my mouth shut).

Although admittedly I could have worked on the paper just as well at Bev’s and then had the bonus of her company when I needed a break. The trouble was that every time I thought of her, I thought of sitting in The Chestnut Tree with Lady Ty across from me saying— _I’m going to outlive my babies_ and the words kept echoing loudly in my head like someone had decided to bang a pair of cymbals together next to my ear.

I don’t think I appreciated then how much strength it took Ty to share that; the amount of love she showed for her sister in admitting to me of all people that she feared she’d made a mistake trying to live a human life. Even if, as she said, she didn’t dislike me on a personal level, I was hardly going to be her first choice in confident for something that deeply personal. She hid it well, calm and poised as she was, but I’d heard the pain beyond the admission, the carefully masked devastation of her confession. And then I imagined Beverley’s face, ten, twenty, thirty years from now, staring into a mirror and making that same realization—that she’d made a mistake trying to live a human life, that me, our hypothetical children and all her loved ones except her mother and sisters were, in all likelihood, going to perish before her—and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t push the image away.

Ty asked me to think about it and I had. Unfortunately, I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. Naturally, I responded in the perfectly reasonable, healthy emotional manner favoured by adults everywhere: Complete and total avoidance of the problem; hope it resolves itself, and watch Battlestar Galactica re-runs while I buried myself in paperwork. Thus had I gloriously reverted to sleeping back in my room at the Folly most nights, and it wasn’t that I was avoiding Beverley. It was just that between Chorley and Lesley, Punch growing ever louder and more insistent in my head, and the quickly approaching deadline of the consultation paper, my plate was already alarmingly full—overflowing, in fact—and with my luck, there was no doubt a lot more shit on the horizon, all of it flying at FTL speed straight at my head. Come what may, I needed to be prepared, didn’t I? I could hardly let myself be consumed by worry about an imagined future I didn’t even know if me and Beverley would share; if we could share it, if it was what Bev wanted.

On the other hand, it wasn’t like this was the first time I’d been accused of avoiding her. I thought about the first time we kissed, wet and huddled together on the plinth of Seven Dials, my arm around her shoulders, the taste of strawberries in my mouth. Shortly after that, I’d come up with the idea for the hostage exchange and in the nine months she spent visiting her rural cousins, I spectacularly neglected to call or visit, as Bev and Lesley both had delighted in reminding me repeatedly.  
Lesley insisted on more than one occasion that it had been deliberate avoidance on my part to head off any emotional commitment.

I thought about that trip to Herefordshire. Amidst murderous unicorns and kidnapped children and the hostage exchange I came painfully close to never returning from, Beverley and I made love for the first time in the River Lug. I remembered how wonderful she’d looked aboard the painted red of the Faerie Queen steam engine, in her over-sized jerkin with her locks tied back, aiming a shotgun at the Queen of the Fae. How grateful, how fortunate, I was that she’d come to my rescue. _Step away from the boyfriend_ , she said—and if I hadn’t already been in mortal peril, my heart might have started pounding. I hadn’t realized we were official.

Afterward, before packing up to return to London, we’d gone back to the cow shed to make love again and I’d poured my relief and my gratitude and my complete adoration into her pleasure—kissing her lips, her breasts, her thighs, tracing the outlines of her body with my fingertips.

On that three-hour drive back to Herefordshire, I’d vowed to myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake I’d made the first time we started to get close. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to be responsible for any more flooding should I become neglectful, but the truth was that Beverley deserved better—deserved the best, in fact. I was her boyfriend now, after all. Let it never be said that Peter Grant doesn’t learn from his mistakes.

When we got back to London, I’d dropped Bev off at at her mum's because, as she explained it, her mum would want not only an update on her trip and the successful impregnation of the Lug, but an explanation as to why she'd gone onto the fairy road and picked a fight with the Queen.

"That could've gone a lot worse," she said.

"Are you going to be in trouble?"

"Nah," she said. "Well a bit, but it'll be fine. Couldn't have you getting yourself stuck there after the Nightingale asked me to keep you safe, could I? Then where would we be?"

I said I didn't know and Bev rolled her eyes at me. "Really? Because I for one don't want to go back to the dark ages of The Nightingale being the only Isaac we've got. If we have to deal with your lot, I’d rather stick with you."

"I’m flattered,” I said. “Nearly starting a war just so you can avoid the fallout from the Folly losing me.”

That earned me an adoring smirk from Bev. She unclasped her seatbelt and opened the door. "Listen, don't you go disappearing on me like the after the last time I saved your arse. Call me.”

"I will," I said but Bev looked sceptical. Not that I blamed her.

She punched me lightly on the arm, a memory and a promise, and left me to report to her mother.

I considered the first time I took her out on a proper date, how beautiful she’d looked in the floor-length sea blue sleeveless dress and navy blazer she’d nicked from Ty. How afterward, she’d led me gracefully down to the banks of her river, where we’d lain together in her garden, the long grass tickling our bare backs, and made love under the sweeping branches of a willow tree along her bank.

Our date transpired a little over two weeks after our return to London. I attributed the delay to the heavy load of yet another slew of lengthy DPS interviews, necessary given the amount of contact I received from Lesley while I was away, coupled with the amount of practice and Latin I had to catch up on—Nightingale had been keeping a daily ledger on what I missed, I swear. According to Beverley, my desire not to seem too eager was a more fitting description.

“I get it,” she’d said, when I called. “You like to maintain your manly façade and play it cool.”

I invoked my right to remain silent so as not to further incriminate myself. Still, while not ideal, I thought two weeks before contact was a significant improvement to my previous record.

"Better," Bev agreed. "But you've got a long way to go."

I asked her if she'd be willing to let me take her out three days later and she accepted with much fanfare and cheer. "Sure," she said. "I'll see you then."

The trouble with fulfilling my vow to be a better boyfriend was I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to approach it. It was one thing to spend a languid month with Beverley in Herefordshire, when it was a work thing and she might turn up at the cow shed at any moment because we were both there and she’d been sent to help me; it was another thing entirely back home, I thought, where a River Goddess and a Wizard simply weren’t the done thing.

It wasn’t that I agreed with Lesley’s less than stellar opinion on my dating skills, but it wasn’t like I had the greatest of role models where dating was concerned either. My dad’s idea of a romantic evening involved heavy drugs and my mom helping him to bed. He wasn’t about to win any Husband of the Year awards any time soon. While ‘don’t turn into my dad’ was a noble goal, it also set the bar for romantic overtures low enough on the ground to trip over. I knew what Lesley would say—take her out for a romantic evening, duh. So naturally I followed that idea to the fullest height imaginable on a constricted budget.

I took her to Rules, a posh historical place in Convent Garden that was still affordable on the budget of the salary of a lowly PC such as myself, helped by the fact that I didn’t have to pay living expenses for the Folly and consequently had some extra wiggle room to splash out on the occasional treat for myself or, as the case may be, a certain River Goddess I happened to be courting. What better use of my funds could there be than taking Beverley out for a night on the town?

The dress code at Rules was smart casual. Now I’m not saying I haven’t developed a healthy appreciation for men’s fashion, but ‘smart casual’ is a ludicrous ambiguous concept. I opted for my best slim fitting suit and doc martens on the grounds that if it was good enough for court, it was good enough for Rules. I was going to forgo a tie, but a striped emerald silk tie I recognized as belonging to Nightingale mysteriously materialized atop my ironed-to-perfection cotton dress shirt. I never did figure out whether Nightingale had suggested it himself, or if Molly had deemed it appropriate on her own accord. Not wanting to hurt the feelings of whichever of the pair had come up with the idea, I included the tie in my attire. Interestingly, I noted Molly giving me a sly, appraising look from behind a corner as I headed out. I pretended not to notice.

Rules was Nightingale’s suggestion. After I spent days agonizing over the best place to take Bev, he saw fit to relieve me of my burden, if only to see me focus on my current Latin assignment.

“It has a rather intimate setting,” he said. “And I believe you’ll appreciate the history of the place.”

“Really,” I said. I managed to resist the urge to put my hand daintily under my chin and stare wide-eyed up at him in the hopes that he’d continue that train of thought, but only just. I wasn’t sure what intrigued me more—the circumstances that led to him concluding it was an intimate setting or the fact that he paid enough attention to my architectural rants, as Lesley used to call them, to have a sense of what I appreciated.

“Really,” he said, and there’d been a distinct mischievous twinkle in his grey eyes. But then he’d tapped the pile of books in front of me with the tip of his finger. “With that out of the way, I do expect this translation by tomorrow.”

He hadn’t been wrong. Rules, having first opened in 1798, held the esteemed honour of being the oldest restaurant in London. Or so their claim went. Actually, since Rules first opened as an oyster bar, there was some contention there—I knew for a fact that Simpson’s Tavern had a good 41 years on it. It all came down to how you defined restaurant. Personally, I was inclined to give the title to Simpson’s, but that’s neither here nor there.

Over the course of two centuries and change, Rules was frequented by everyone from Henry Irving, he who infamously inspired Dracula, Dorothy Sayers, author of the amateur sleuth novels of Lord Peter Whimsy, and the Prince of Wales. Redesigned in 1873 by Alfred Cross, the Victorian excesses of the interior hadn’t changed much from when the Prince of Wales was spending evenings by the lattice window with Lillie Langtry: yellow-lacquered walls, decorated in Regency paintings and antique clocks, a fire-place and etched glass skylights. The management clearly went to a great deal of effort to maintain the original features and all of this added up to me and Bev eating a candlelit dinner under a high Victorian ceiling.

“You must love this,” Bev said.

I did but in truth was more interested in Beverley that evening; the way her locks tumbled freely down her back, the way the candlelight flickered in her dark eyes, and the way her full lips curved upward when she looked at me.

She asked me to tell her about the architecture and I was happy to oblige, not least because it gave me something to talk about that wasn’t spurting out my undying love for her which, while a big step up from my dad’s favourite form of romantic overtures, was perhaps slightly premature. I didn’t think she was interested in the architecture itself, but she seemed to enjoy hearing what I had to say just the same, smiling as she listened.

“How did things go with your mum?” I asked.

“She wasn’t best pleased about me barreling into Fairy Land, but she said the Queen had no business taking you anyway. She asked after you.”

“Oh,” I said. “What did you tell her?”

Bev smiled and reached out her hand to trace the tip of her finger gently across the back of my hand. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said.

Yes, I thought, I would.

Afterward, she led me outside and kissed me under Rules’ red awning. She took my hand. Her palm was warm and small and soft over my own.

“Peter,” she said. “Aside from your copious opinions on the history and architecture of the place, this isn’t really us, is it? I appreciate the effort but you don’t have to make these kinds of grand gestures. Just call me, yeah? And answer when I call you. Just spend time with me. Your job takes you away sometimes; I get that. But stop making excuses and be there.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t even give her the well-practiced schoolboy puppy dog eyes, so universally irresistible they brokered no question as to whether I should be forgiven. Lesley would’ve been proud.

“What,” said Bev, stepping back to look me in the eye. “No cheeky comment or attempt to deflect?”

I shrugged. “The country is made of kryptonite. I’m certain of it. Missing kids was about the only thing that could have got me out in the wilderness. But I suppose I never did apologize for disappearing on you while you were upstream.”

“No,” said Bev. “You didn’t. I’m impressed.”

She smiled and leaned in to reward me with a kiss. “Why don’t you come for a visit by my river?”

The look of terror on my face must have been as loud as a siren because Beverley laughed. “You don’t have to come in with me,” she said. “It’s a bit soon for that, don’t you think? Even if it weren’t—I won’t ask that of you, now or ever. If it’s not what you, I can accept that.”

And so she’d driven me down the A3 toward the Kingston Bypass, where she owned both halves of a 1920s semi on Beverley Avenue, right along the banks of her river.

“I sort of inherited it,” she said.

“How do you sort of inherit a house?” I asked.

She shrugged and I let it go. Although I learned later that Oxley’s son was the previous owner which explained Beverley’s reluctance to talk about it.

Beverley led me by the hand through the cedar gate, straight through to her back garden. It was late summer and although the air was starting to chill, it was unseasonably warm, the air heavy with the scent of rain and the energy of a coming storm. The garden was large and overgrown, the sort of great wild thing that any landscaper would have wept to behold. It was swaths of green nearly up to my knees, tangles of long grass and wildflowers and tree saplings along the edge of the bank, all of which I utterly failed to identify—though Beverley made sure to provide me a detailed and instructive lesson later—and all leading down to the deep pool of the Beverley Brook.  
  
"Couldn't you get someone to cut the grass?" I asked.

"What do I want cut grass for?" she said, stopping under the willow and turning to face me.

"Fair point," I said.

I put my arm around her waist and looked down at the Beverley Brook. Although I’d known Bev a year and a half by that point, it was my first good look at her river since we met. I knew from research that in most places, she was shallow, revealing the pebbles at her bottom but here, she was a dark pool, the lamplights from the surrounding houses shining off her deep glassy surface.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

Bev shrugged. “I need a lot of work. Apparently, I’m not meeting my ‘Good Ecological Potential’ which is bollocks. It’s not my fault people wouldn’t stop altering me—and I wasn’t even around for most of that. But I am hoping to set up some projects in the next few years to increase biodiversity.”

We lay together under the swooping protection of the Willow, our bodies leaving indentations in the ground. The long grass tickled the back of my neck, a cushion as soft as any mattress in spite of its dampness.

“This won’t…” I said, gesturing at the nearness of her river.

“No,” she said and pressed her full lips to mine. Slowly, garment by garment, we undressed one another, our bodies folding into each other for warmth.

Afterward, Beverley went inside to get us some tea. I offered to help, but Bev said she really didn't think I wanted to see the state of her house and, to save me having a heart attack, I was probably best waiting outside.

My clothes were damp and cold from laying on the grass so I donned them quickly, shivering, and then nipped back to the orange Asbo to grab my overnight bag. The street was quiet, but I didn't fancy putting on an unexpected show for some poor OAP out walking their dog by changing in the warmth of the Asbo so I took the bag back out to Beverley's yard and was just unzipping my trousers when I heard the sliding French door open and close behind me, quickly followed by the soft padding of her footsteps as she made her way back to me. I hesitated.

"Oh, excellent timing," said Beverley. "Don't stop on my account."

Now ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded putting on a bit of a show for Bev, but I was cold and damp so in this instance, I opted instead for warmth and speed. Still, I felt her eyes on me the entire time I dressed in fresh, blissfully warm jeans, t-shirt and jumper. I can’t say I minded.

"Like what you see?" I asked, once I'd finished dressing.

"You wouldn't be here if I didn't," she said and offered me a still-steaming mug. "You know the drill. No obligation."  
I wondered if we’d always have to do this—if years from now, at every meal we took together, at every cup of tea, we’d have to rescind obligation.

Not if you go swimming in her river, a voice in my head whispered but that was probably just my mum, or a bit of Bev’s riverine glamour leaking through unintentionally. I tried not to splutter in panic at the thought and failed spectacularly.

If we were living together, surely—but how long did it take? Was it even a question of time? Was it a question of intimacy between the host and those who partook in the host’s offering?  
On any other matter, I'd be eager to experiment, but this—it wasn't that I wasn't interested. It's just that I wasn't sure I was quite ready for the implications of the answer, whatever that might be.

Finally, I considered the course of the next year, over which I'd like to think I'd done well on my promise to be an attentive boyfriend worthy of Bev. It hadn't taken long, after that first visit, for us to fall into a kind of easy comfort with one another. I’d gone back to Bev’s the very next evening and though she’d been right about the state of the place, at least I was prepared for it. I woke up next to her in the morning, and things felt the way they had between us in Herefordshire. The way it should’ve done from the moment we stepped back into London if I hadn’t been focused on making things perfect, on giving her the fairy tale romance I always thought my mum deserved.

I still lived at the Folly, officially, but spent more nights than not at Bev's. Bev's cleanliness left something to be desired, but after the thing with the Russians, she asked Maksim to come in once a week to do some tidying so that I wasn't left with doing it all myself or, worse, Bev’s untenable alternative that I simply shut my eyes and plug my nose in order to ignore the piles of dirty dishes, empty take-away boxes, clothes and a myriad other items I didn’t want to think about that littered the floor. And while I probably shouldn’t have condoned the situation with Maksim, well—better him than me. I was grateful not to have to walk around in a house that looked like the aftermath of a zombie invasion. There were still frequently cobwebs in the corners and crumbs on the counters, a far reach from my mum’s standards, but at least I didn't walk in and immediately have to call in the hazmat unit.

We both had busy schedules which sometimes kept us apart more often than we’d like. A police constable's work is never done, especially when he's also got to contend with learning magic and half a dozen languages. Meanwhile, Bev had started her first term at Uni by then, reading Environmental Science. On top of that, she had her unofficial liaison work amongst the demi-monde. That made it difficult to always touch base with one another, to find opportunities for quality time. But we made it work—baths together in the large claw foot tub, the occasional movie night when we could swing it. Sometimes it was as simple as a shared cup of coffee in the morning, or sitting in the back garden side by side, each of us engrossed in our own respective work. Stolen moments and brief kisses and Bev’s hands running along my bare chest as I put off getting up in the morning.

I remembered one evening when I'd opted to go back to the Folly because I was exhausted from dealing with the mould situation, the Folly was closer and anyway, I knew Bev was spending the night with one of her friends at Queen Mary’s so they could have a late night cram session for the exam they had in the morning. I'd arrived back in my room only to discover the next morning that I had nothing to wear—I'd been spending so much time at Bev's that somehow, all my clothing had migrated to hers and I had to resort to the spare outfit I keep in my emergency overnight bag. It was an eye-opening experience.

However I looked at it, over the past year, Bev had become an essential part of my life. Now here she was, wondering if I'd been avoiding her and—what could I say?

“The truth, Peter,” I heard Lesley tell me. And honestly, it’d be nice if she could stop appearing in my head to offer her expert commentary and wisdom. Apparently I still wasn’t prepared to let her go.

I turned to face Bev and realized with a start that while I stood there stupidly disappearing into the wild adventurous land of memory, Bev had already set the beer and take-away containers on the table and was staring at me with her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised.

The door was at my back, the handle within easy reach. I wondered, if I bolted out the door and legged it, how far I could get before Bev caught up with me? If running away worked for certain Time Lords, why not me? Perhaps I could flee to America and Kimberley Reynolds would let me sleep on her couch until I got myself settled. I wasn’t a fully trained practitioner, but maybe I could teach her a bit of magic and she could vouch for me with the FBI. Once I completed training at Quantico, we could set up the Office of Partner Engagement as a legitimate, community oriented department, fully equipped to deal with magic, the demi-monde and all things esoteric, and act as a counterweight to the military industrial complex that was the Virginia Gentlemen’s Company. I liked to think I could make a decent Mulder to her Scully.

“We were doing so well, Peter,” said Bev. “What’s with the regression?”

Making a run for it wasn’t worth it, I decided—I’d never make it and anyway, the state of things there, I’d never be able to feel safe again. Not that the UK was or ever had been any bastion of racist-free paradise, as evinced by my recent encounter being pulled over for driving while cheerful.

"What are we doing, Bev?” I said. “What is this between us?"

"It's whatever we want it to be," she said.

"What do you want it to be?"

"I don't know,” she said. "I think that depends on why my boyfriend has been avoiding me."

She plopped onto the couch and patted the cushion next to her, inviting me to join her. I did so with only minor trepidation—which I wrote down as a win in my books.

I took a beer from the pack and offered it to Bev, just for something to do that didn’t involve looking into her eyes. "Ty gave me the big sister talk," I said.

Bev snapped the cap off her bottle and frowned at me. "And—what, she scared you off, did she? Don't tell me you're afraid of Ty, Peter."

"I'm afraid of hurting you," I said in a surge of honesty that surprised even me.

"I can take care of myself. What exactly did Ty say?"

"That she was going to outlive her children and trying to live a human life was a mistake."

"So your response was to stop coming by and start ducking my calls?"

“Well, when you put it like that,” I said.

"Jesus, Peter," Bev said. She turned her glare on me and it wasn't often these days that I felt her glamour working, but there it was—the rush of angry water behind her words. "That's not Ty's decision to make, and it sure as hell isn't yours either. How does shutting me out solve anything?"

I supposed this was one of those cases where my intrepid wit wouldn’t be appreciated so I swallowed my natural inclination to tell her that it had served me well enough for many a year. Instead I acknowledged that she might be on to something and apologized.

"Ty doesn't know everything, Peter," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"She's the oldest in my family—but there's an entire world of gods and goddesses out there who have entire human lifetimes of experiences with this kind of thing. Of course she'd be too proud to ask them. But I'm not. And she's made a lot of assumptions about what it means to marry a mortal. If you don't go into the river with me—and if you don't, I maintain what I said before about that being ok. And if you don't and we have kids, then yeah, they might be mortal. That happens sometimes, Isis says. But not always—we might not know for years, really. Until they're grown, or until their bodies decide they have some need of their immortality."

Beverley placed her hands on either side of my face, and I looked into her dark eyes and full, smiling lips. "I think we've had a breakthrough today. You actually told me what's been on your mind. Next time, let's do it without the period of regression and me finally having to come over here to force it out of you. Deal?"

"Deal,” I said. And then, because I have a remarkable talent for putting my foot in it, added “Our kids would be ridiculously good-looking and multi-talented though.”

Bev snorted and rested her head in the crook of my arm. “Careful, Peter, you’re getting dangerously close to admitting you want to have kids with me—which wouldn’t be half bad, you know. The world’s not going to end if you talk about your feelings.”

“That remains to be seen,” I said. “Us all cozy up here—who knows what’s going on out there? Maybe we’ll walk outside tomorrow and the zombie apocalypse will be well under way.”

“What you mean to say,” said Bev, undeterred. “Is ‘Do you want kids, Bev?’”

“You’re tempting fate here, Bev.”

Bev raised her head to look me in the eye and waited. Was she taking tips from Guleed?

I busily went about grabbing a beer for myself and opening it, which can be a surprisingly long and arduous task if you know how to do it right. Perhaps if I stretched the process out long enough Bev would take pity on me, but I felt her eyes on me the entire time, waiting far too patiently for my liking. Definitely taking tips from Guleed then. I chugged half the bottle for a bit of liquid courage, or maybe just to delay what Bev was waiting to hear a little longer. Although I supposed delaying conversations was what got us into this mess in the first place. “So,” I said casually, and my voice definitely didn’t crack with emotion of any kind. “Do you want kids?”

Bev slid her hand into mine, her fingers fitting easily into my own. “There, see, that’s not so bad.”

That was still somewhat debatable if you asked me. I pointedly kept my eyes forward.

“One day, maybe,” said Bev, squeezing my hand gently. “I’m not ready to make that decision yet. But if we’re going to keep this going long-term, and I would, I’m going to need you to continue having conversations like this. Talk to me about what’s on your mind, instead of burying it and running away. Can you do that?”

I said that not only could I do that, I would do that. Like I said, I learned from my mistakes and Bev had a point. I felt her cheeks widen into a smile against my side in response.

“Good,” she said, and leaned forward to pass me a container of scrumptious curry.


End file.
